Aid to Israel: A Matter of Politics

Article excerpt

ARE the United States loan guarantees that Israel needs to help
its flood of new immigrants a political matter - or merely
humanitarian?

Many American Jewish leaders have said the loans are strictly
humanitarian. These leaders have tried to avoid any hint of linkage
between provision of the guarantees and the behavior of the Israeli
government. (Some of them were horrified when Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir first requested $10 billion in guarantees.
According to reports in the Washington Jewish Week, they begged Mr.
Shamir to take a back seat to their efforts to secure the
guarantees on humanitarian grounds.)

Of course, the challenge of building new lives for Jews fleeing
Soviet lands has a strong humanitarian appeal. But so does the
challenge of building a hopeful future for 4.2 million Palestinians
suffering from occupation or dispersion; or a project to give aid
to 18 million victims of South African apartheid; or the hundreds
of millions of other folks throughout the world - and at home - who
could use a helping hand.

There is one particular reason, however, why Jews fleeing former
Soviet lands might rightfully expect American taxpayers to give
them special treatment. In the early 1970s, the US Congress passed
the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which made normalization of relations
between the world's two nuclear megapowers conditional on Soviet
Jews winning the right to free emigration. So perhaps there is a
commitment implied there, to help Soviet Jews find their feet once
they finally win this right.

(Absorption of these migrants could be cheaper if Jews were
allowed, as most might prefer, to come to the US rather than to
Israel. But Shamir was against giving them that freedom of choice.
His aim was always closer to the ideology and politics of settling
Jews in "Greater Israel" rather than meeting their own, merely
"human," preferences.)

Even if we concede that Jackson-Vanik puts the US under a
humanitarian obligation to help Soviet Jews, US taxpayers and
government officials still can't ignore the political dimension of
aiding Jews in their rehabilitation. …